1. Respiration as a Measure of Soil Health: Challenges and Opportunities

In recent years, respiration has become a commonly-used soil health metric. It has been used as a standalone predictor of soil N supplying capacity and in conjunction with other metrics to assess overall soil health. However, the sources of variation underlying respiration itself have not been thoroughly assessed. We show that across growing regions in California, respiration was unable to accurately predict soil N supply. The R2 values were much higher in fields that had received a recently-incorporated... J. Wade, S. Culman, T. Hurriso, W. Horwath, R. Miller